Gen Z Lawyers Will Fight for Justice Outside the Supreme Court

Like many of our classmates, we came to law school aspiring to expand substantive rights by making well-reasoned arguments before the US Supreme Court.

Fueled by a handful of Obama-era progressive wins and inspired by appellate impact lawyers like Constance Baker Motley, Thurgood Marshall, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, we believed we could build a more just world through progressive litigation.

But the more we’ve learned about the court, and seen with our own eyes, the more focused we’ve become on building lasting justice in more direct and democratic ways.

Decision by decision, the Supreme Court reminds a generation of future lawyers that “legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.” We understand—because we feel it ourselves each day as the Supreme Court harms us and our peers—that the history of the Supreme Court is one of white supremacy, antidemocracy, and dispossession.

For our generation, studying doctrine and learning how to litigate can feel futile as the Supreme Court rolls back abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, affirmative action, workers’ rights, student loan debt cancellation, health-care access, and the government’s ability to fight climate change.

Today’s law students intimately understand the pitfalls of relying on nine unelected and unaccountable justices to define our lives. We believe it shouldn’t be the Supreme Court’s role to decide whether we can obtain abortions, marry our partners, attend schools that reflect the country’s diversity, pay for college and law school, and weather the impending storm of climate change.

As law students today, we are skeptical of the Supreme Court’s power to do good and disdainful of its power to cause harm. But more importantly, we are looking outside the court to build justice with staying power.

Dobbs opened a generation of law students’ eyes to the fact that rights conferred by the Supreme Court can be taken away just the same. It encouraged us to seriously consider who should get to decide our rights and how we will secure them.

We are eager to correct the mistakes of previous generations of lawyers, who, in our view, relied too heavily upon the Supreme Court to confer rights that should have been fundamental from the beginning.

When Dobbs was leaked during one of our final exam periods, we discussed how securing abortion rights could have gone differently, how lawyers might have partnered with organizers and built collective political and moral power, and how we could have pushed harder for state and federal legislation to codify abortion rights. And we resolved to take action.

Rather than despair, we will spend our careers building justice outside of the Supreme Court.

Today, we are on picket lines, helping workers secure rights for themselves rather than pleading with other lawyers to confer them. We are working on electoral campaigns and in local, state, and federal government, crafting legislation and pushing executive officials to take bold action to get people the help they need.

And we are electing and working for state supreme court justices who know that their states’ constitutions can be responsive to our generation’s needs rather than a graveyard of history and tradition.

Our generation understands that the Supreme Court is hostile to the policies we want to see. Gen Z is the most racially diverse generation in history and has more solidarity than any other. We aspire for a democracy that works for everyone, even if the court says otherwise.

The Supreme Court won’t stop us.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

Author Information

Devon Shewell is a rising 2L at Harvard Law School from Northwest Missouri. Morgan Sperry is a rising 3L at Harvard Law School from Massachusetts.

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